Abscissa Whurd?

We stared at the paper and it stared back at us.

Determine the abscissa of point X.

It is quite humiliating to know that our year never learnt this simple vocabulary. Abscissa. That small, taunting word which takes up so little space in our lives, yet still haunts us till today. Abscissa. Echoing. Killing us softly from within. Abscissa. Intimidating our intelligence, reducing our brains to nothing more than a faulty, mushy substance. Abscissa. Lighting our emotions ablaze, cracking our heads like raw eggs, just to come up with an answer, an escape from the loss of depression. Abscissa. That one mark which separates us from a perfect score. The death of a student's confidence, admitting defeat to the mere existence of a three-syllable word.

Humble humiliation.

There was a dark void over that question, seemingly preventing students from interfering with the unnatural disaster taking place. Many left it as it is, deciding not to mess with the course of their ill fate of twisted misinterpretation. But one student presented the magnitude of the situation best, with a twinge of exasperated honesty in it:

"To the horror of both examiner and candidate, the abscissa could not be identified due to lack of comprehension." -Yours truly-

Ahem. Couldn't help it!